Bright Red Fruit is a powerful novel in verse navigating cultural belonging, daughter and mother relationships, freedom of expression, and online predatory behavior.

This is a timely novel and one that leaves a mark for years.

Elhillo writes exceptionally about a topic that needs to be told and retold... how predatory adults groom and exploit teens. This book reminds me a lot of The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo. Unfortunately, many girls will relate to this story. Hopefully this book reaches them before it's too late.

Told through letters, emails, and poetry, I was all in. Packed with issues, Samira's story shows resilience. The formatting of the book can be a selling point for students who might need something a little different from a traditional novel.

Samira is a teenage girl- experiencing all the things teenage girls experience and learning valuable lessons along the way.

Feeling like an outsider in a foreign world with an overprotective, unreasonable, immigrant mother Samira finds a home in the world of slam poetry.

She’s found her voice and is embracing her talent when she meets a boy who puts her on cloud 9 and convinces her that he’s the moon and she’s his star. Of course,she thinks this is her first love and soon she finds herself bending the rules and compromising her integrity for his love and attention.

This is a beautiful, culturally infused cautionary tale I think young adults should read.

This book touches on everything from online safety to teens trying to navigate freedom in their parents' homes. Told in prose, this book grips you from beginning to end. It makes you stop and think about how close we all are to losing that one thing that we work so hard for. How it can easily be snatched away by someone we confide in over online chatting. Or how something as innocent as an online friendship and tear your entire family apart.

I'm glad I made time to read this verse novel because it's a brilliant work about teen issues and real world fears. This novel delves into what young girls don't know about the world, even when their overprotective parents believe they are "keeping them safe."

The protagonist is a adolescent to an immigrant single mother whose understanding of her daughter comes from numerous rumors she chose to believe over the years, which walls up their relationship. When another rumor leads to the protagonist being unjustly grounded for the entire summer, she pours herself into her writing, which gains traction in online writing forums. This includes a popular young male poet who decides to "mentor" her. The protagonist, who is 16, believes she is experiencing "love" for the first time with her 25 year-old boyfriend. However, the poet wants something else from her and it could cost her everything.

The narrative the author presents a different type of cautionary tale for teen readers and their parental figures. The poetry allows the prose to embellish the emotions felt by the protagonist throughout the narrative. And, mythological readers will appreciate the allusions to Persephone.

This is one of the Best (Young Adult) Books of 2024!

A beautiful story about coming to age story but in verse! Beautiful! I really loved this story and would recommend! Very emotional read!

This book was honestly so beautiful. I loved the language and the flow. I think the main character was written really well and felt realistic. I also enjoyed reading the growth of the relationship between Samira and her mother. Readers that enjoy realistic novels in verse (similar to Acevedo's books) will likely love this one. I'm looking forward to reading more from this author.

I read a physical ARC for a panel at the ALAN Workshop. It's a text that I've continued to recommend to my students (practicing teachers) to pull excerpts for class that will then invite students to read the whole text. I find novel in verse hard to sell to my teachers, but this one is so complex and offers so many entry points for teaching, that it's been an easier sell than others. A phenomenal book. I really loved the friendships in this book.

I enjoyed this book for what I could. I love book told in verse, I have enjoyed reading them from when I was in Jr. High and discovered Ellen Hopkins. I like all the emotional experiences that authors write about in book told in verse. They stick with me long after from how its told in verse and the experiences and emotion the characters go through. What the characters experience is so real that it stays with me for a long time.

This book is phenomenal. I wasn't sure I'd like it based on the blurb, but wanted to read it anyway because I loved Home is Not a Country, and I'm so glad I did. This book also addresses the complexities of immigrant mother/daughter relationships so perfectly, and the writing is, of course, gorgeous. The topic of predatory adults using teenagers is handled thoughtfully and honestly, and, without getting too specific, the ending feels realistic but still positive enough to keep the book from being too dark and depressing of a read.

Really enjoyed this novel in verse. Samira's culture prevents her from being a carefree young woman and she starts to rebel against the rules but not for nefarious reasons. She just wants to date and perform poetry and be a teenager.

Bright Red Fruit by Safia Elhillo is an honest coming of age story. I enjoyed reading this book which was told in verse with bright characterizations and lyrical prose. If you like Poet X you will love Bright Red Fruit.

Safia Elhillo's latest, Bright Red Fruit, is an exquisite novel in verse. The main character, Samira, lives in DC with her mother. Her mother is from Sudan and she imposes on Samira many of the cultural pressures that she grew up enduring. The close-knit community at their church has decided that Samira is a bad girl, and she internalizes it so deeply that she doesn't know who to talk to about it. When she meets Horus, an older poet in an online forum, she finally feels seen. Tamadur and Lina are her dear friends, but she puts everything on the line for Horus, including their friendship. This story is an incredibly quick read, but it will linger with the reader for a long time. The characters are exceptionally depicted, the poetry is beautiful, and the story is heart-wrenching. It is very much a story about finding and using your voice.

Verse novels provide a unique insight into a life, giving a person's thought processes and impressions more than events. That can be interesting but is tricky to engage with. It's reflective and worth dwelling over as Elhillo examines the pressures of family and culture.

I cried....... it's so beautifully written. This is a coming-of-age story about Samira a Sudanese teen in New York who is struggling and rebelling against the strict cultural expectations as well as attempting to heal the fractures in her relationship with her mother.

She finds herself in poetry, unfortunately an opportunistic older man uses her new interest as a means to groom her, use her, take advantage of the fact that she is desperately seeking validation and love.

Every part of me felt connected to this story. Highly Recommend for those of us who have ever felt alone in a crowded room, prejudged, or was ever blinded by sweet words and a devious smile.

Bright Red Fruit is coming of age novel written in verse that, through Samira, a Sudanese-America, explores cultural identity, freedom of expression and how easily minors can be exploited.

Samira is a teenage through and through. She wants to live life in a more American way and doesn’t understand why her mother is as suffocating as she is. Samira feeling suffocated leads her to getting creative to try and live the life that she wants too, which also leads to a sticky situation.

As an older reader, it became clear, quickly, where this was going to go. It left me anxious to see if I was right and exactly what was going to end up happening with Samira as she starts to explore a life and relationship she had been sheltered from.

Elhillo had a lovely way of tangling Persephone’s story with Samira’s which only added to the anxiety of what was going to happen to her. I really ended up enjoying this part of the novel.

Bright Red Fruit is a novel I would definitely recommend for female teens as I think there really is a good lesson here. But, honestly it could be great for anyone, especially thoughts who are aspiring writers.

Wanted to read this because I really enjoyed "A home is not a country" by Safia, and this one is even better. The story flowed so seamlessly and beautifully. I enjoyed the mixture of it being told in verse and also being told in more traditional ways. Samira was so easy to root for, and I loved the development of the relationship between her and her mother. It starts fractured and seems beyond repair, but they're able to get it back. I also enjoyed the exploration of community. Samira is part of a close knit Sudanese American Immigrant community and that can be a bad thing when it comes to rumors spreading and reputations being demeaned but it also ends up being this powerful thing that saves Samira. The Horus relationship was a great example of grooming and emotional abuse. All in all, it is a powerful, impactful, and beautiful story.

Wow! This book was so poignant and full of emotion! This book is written in prose and tells I love the main character, Samira. I saw so much of my teenage self in her…looking for love from older men that ids really manipulation, and seeking love and attention from her mom. Her initial fragile relationship with her mother brought up so many emotions in me that I have tried to bury.

Elhillo wrote a beautifully crafted masterpiece. Her words came to life and jumped off the page, and the characters’ emotions were so palpable. We got to witness Samira on a journey of pain and heartbreak, and then we see her come into her own as she ends her journey discovering herself and coming into her own. This story was extremely relatable, entertaining, and deep. Elhillo narrates the audiobook, and she did a great job! I am a new fan, and will be reading all of her books later this year.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Children’s for this beautiful ARC in exchange for my honest review.

On god, this was the single best in-verse novel I've ever read. Congrats to the author for possessing this much skill!